SORENSON:Colorful evening grosbeak can sing holiday carols all day long

Charles Sorenson / Special to The Courier & Press
After a 37-year absence, an evening grosbeak, a lone female, has returned to the Sorenson household feeder.

For the past two weeks, this regularly irregular Glamour Girl has shown up to methodically shell sunflower seeds at our platform feeder. Referred to as a "Hoover vacuum cleaner with wings," an evening grosbeak can readily down a significant pile of sunflower seeds every day.

But our single girl doesn't make a serious dent in the seed supply and doesn't mind company, so cardinals, house finches, even occasional brave pine siskins join the big girl at the feeder. Together, what a colorful picture they make!

We spotted Glamour Girl first at our tube feeder, but her too-big bulk wouldn't fit on the short perches. Bottom line: Tube feeders don't work well for these showstoppers. Still, she managed to balance on the edge of the tube's attached tray and eat her fill.

After watching her balancing act during that first visit, we added a hanging platform feeder, hoping she'd enjoy more comfortable service. She did. Now it's her home away from home.

Yard records show it's been 37 years since we hosted an evening grosbeak. Even after all these years, I remember them: four males and two females, chattering, gobbling down the striped sunflower seed we fed in those days. They'd all crowded simultaneously onto the big hopper feeder outside the kitchen window, squabbling for position.

Appropriately named birds, about the size of starlings, they wear grossly large beaks. But the "evening" part of their name comes from the mistaken early belief that they sing only in evening. Nevertheless, the common name stuck, even though we enjoy their carols all day long, although the scientific name was changed to Coccothraustes, meaning, more aptly, "grain crusher."

Our female visitor, like most females in the bird kingdom, lacks the bright bold gold of her male counterpart, so I wish she'd bring her boyfriend around. Year-round, he's almost as bright gold as our summer goldfinches. But, as one author notes, grosbeaks dwarf goldfinches "like Sumo wrestlers."

Most observers believe that males tend to winter farther north than females, perhaps accounting for the females-only population here.

Still, both sexes are flashy dressers, wearing bold white bars on otherwise black wings. She also wears a string of pearls on her tail — a series of debonair white spots — that males lack. Where he's gold, however, she's gray, sporting only a mustard-yellow shawl across her shoulders.

It's the bill, though, that makes them startling standouts at the feeder.

In spring and fall, most of us enjoy the evening grosbeak's cousin, the more familiar rose-breasted grosbeaks. But evening grosbeaks wander south only during winter, after spending their breeding season in western mountains and north through Canada. Their migration, however, is irregular, depending, scientists think, on food supplies.

Oddly, these primarily western and northern birds didn't show their big-beaked faces on the East Coast until the early 1900s, drawn east by seeds of box-elder trees and by outbreaks of spruce budworm, both favorite grosbeak foods. But Audubon.org notes that populations have plummeted by an alarming 91 percent since 1967, likely because of the shrinking boreal forest and extensive pesticide applications to kill spruce budworm.

Other possible causes for their decline include harvest of old forest, climate change and, perhaps, parasites and disease.

Will they ever flock back to our winter feeders? We'll see.

A lifelong area resident and backyard birder, Sharon Sorenson lives on a 3-acre certified backyard wildlife habitat and has more than 150 bird species on her yard list. Email her at forthebirdscolumn@yahoo.com.